they have had a less than harmonious past occupy wall street of the new york city police department have clashed since the movement began now the n.y.p.d. has a different view of occupy we'll tell you what it isn't just a moment. be careful what you tax police departments here in the u.s. want permission to store all of your text messages for a two year period is this just another sign of big brother going too far. as congress and the president picker over upcoming fiscal cliff decisions many inside the beltway say the path to a stable u.s. economic future can be fanned found in the bowl simpson's plan coming up five things you should know that's included in the plan.

it's friday december seventh eight him in washington d.c. mega lopez and you're watching our team. right will we begin tonight in egypt where demonstrations against the newly elected president mohamed morsi have continued to grow the unrest in egypt is now well into its third week and if you think you are seeing deja vu with the protests playing out in tucker square you're right once again the demonstrations are becoming very violent very quickly as many as six people were killed last night in the clashes and now all of this is over the near absolute power president morsi has claimed last month when he was trying to draft a new constitution even claiming judicial immunity and despite his efforts to call for dialogue morsi has fueled tensions further with a fiery speech last night where he refused to call off a referendum on a draft constitution although his vice president has indicated tonight that the referendum may in fact be delayed now journalist bella true is in cairo and she

brings us the very latest in a story. as you can probably see behind me there are hundreds and thousands of protesters who met in the middle because there are barricades on either side of the street the karni chanting against the muslim brotherhood's the president and the constitution how this happened we're not entirely sure protesters i've spoken to said that centrally the republican guards just stepped aside and let people cast at first people worried that this might be a sign of some kind of trap or actually other people were saying that maybe they just felt that the hundreds of thousands of people because it has now stretched to hundreds of thousands of people just overwhelm the guards and they just thought it would be safe to let people through at the moment you can see protesters stretching into the horizon as they chance against president morsy vowed to stay here all night i know the scenes are quite jubilant so we haven't heard of any violence yes

it seems that they mean at the moment under foot so the republican guards erected these barricades on thursday in praising this curfew after the violent clashes there actually standing on top of tanks with protesters who would chancing the protests the chanting against the mostly they don't appear to be doing anything about the crowds we have an absence here of of pro president supporters use which actually helps in terms of violence as most of the clashes have been between rival protest groups meeting and then the scene times violence one recent development we had is the justice minister came out and said that the president might consider delaying the referendum if opposition forces agree to dialogue to engage in dialogue without preconditions not entirely sure what this statement means but it is a sign that perhaps the president is mulling over potential talks with opposition forces other than not to cause the president's surge in his in his speech to the nation last night that he would hold talks with opposition leaders on saturday which is tomorrow to talk about the problems that they have with the constitution and the

concept of like aeration which many scenes have said is a massive power grab by the president's reaction by the coalition of opposition forces the national salvation front was an absolute no so really we're still in a deadlock. that was reporter bell true coming to us from cairo egypt. all right well here's a story i bet you thought you'd never see the occupy wall street activists in the new york police department working together to lower crime rates the scene was quite different just a few short months ago. video like this flooded television screens last year when thousands of occupy protesters clashed with the police and the kani park and around the city hundreds were arrested in the chaos and relations with tween the two organizations have been rocky ever since but all that changed this october when hurricane sandy struck the coast of new york and new jersey hurricane sandy forced more than

a path of destruction it paved the way for cooperation between the n.y.p.d. and the occupy movement as a result of the increased presence of occupy and other neighborhood nonprofit crime rates have actually gone down in new york normally conditions like frank and storm caused looting muggings and other crimes but not this time an n.y.p.d. police source told the new york post quote this crisis allowed us all to remove the politics and the differences we had to do our job and come together to the aid of the people we all rose to the occasions so is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship to answer all that and more earlier i was joined by occupy wall street activists goldie from new york i asked him why the police violence during the occupy wall street movement has led to a decrease in crime in the wake of hurricane sandy. what's happening right now is everyone very hurt by hurricane sandy and i think everyone is working really hard

together to help those in need that's what we're doing we got off the ground running the day after the storm to help people. and the police are doing the same as far as the data in lowering the. great. i'm sure that's because everyone's really really busy just licking their wounds and helping other people in our case but instead in situations like this what we've seen before not only in the us with hurricane katrina and other places is that looting still well up on houston as a matter of desperation for these people and if so how is your organization working to to correct that situation. again we're just we're just helping people. i would just i'm not really sure where the where the data comes from we are working . closely with the n.y.p.d. whenever they help people where that where they're also so i i'm not really here i

know in red hook that a special situation where they're working even closer with the n.y.p.d. . but i think it's better to go ahead and talk about what exactly you are doing with the n.y.p.d. how are these coordination efforts happening and how do you guys really come together in the past month. i'm based out of the occupy sandy hub in staten island and we have the n.y.p.d. retired n.y.p.d. and its hard firefighters right next to us they cook for us and for the whole community. we work and say hello with them each and every day i think it's just under duress this is what sort of humanity does and unfortunately as things get better that you know will be will be new new strains introduced especially when it comes to where we come from which is occupy wall street we advocate for poor people and usually it's against people that run the system so as we're seeing more and more houses condemned and the possibility of eminent domain and developers coming

in. you're going to meet occupy sandy will morph back into occupy wall street and you'll see us back the way we are when we advocate for poor people and talk about the n.y.p.d. and what i was specifically they can learn from the occupy movement i mean obviously your movement has knows how to organize they've had to do it in the past you were able to support yourselves as economy park by dividing up donated food and blankets so what has or can the n.y.p.d. and other nonprofit organizations learn from the occupy movement. well it seems like the whole last year we were training for this moment because we know how to operate with very little and as soon as we got donations and resources that seemed substantial we were out which is nothing compared to what the red cross has but we were out on the streets doing what we do which is providing like direct actions to help people what. the n.y.p.d. when there is no state emergency system is what we found on the ground and through

all these meetings where we're all the different groups meet together like fema the red cross we've met with them repeatedly we have yet to see sort of an emergency plan what they have is a bunch of applications that they want people to fill out and they seem to have some kind of medium and possibly long term plan but that's we haven't gotten there yet we're still in emergency mode where people need shelter they need they need warmth they need power and none of these things people have in a lot of the affected areas so that there doesn't seem to be an emergency system in place i hate to tell you but. so far we're filling a huge void out there which is providing people with with basic needs and basic routes to take to get the things that they need to be slightly more comfortable and all the while we're talking about this i notice that you're also wearing a yellow occupy sandy badge on tell us quickly where people can donate to if they choose to do south yeah you can go to occupy sandy dot org and all or all

information is there including you can donate supplies or through your wedding registry or money through through our accounts on there we're all very proud of this it always gets a good fist bump from fema the red cross because they know the work we're doing absolutely and so let's also talk about what you exactly have learned from the new york police department if anything i mean you've been working side by side with these nonprofits and also with the new york police department do you think that any of your experience from what i'm hearing has contributed to being able to translate into the occupy movement into conny park and beyond just this hurricane sandy. i mean a lot of these organizations are coming to us asking asking us for our information and our data from canvassing because we were first on the ground. and the red cross actually said hey we don't know where to go because you guys didn't tell us for some reason we were supposed to tell them where to go when really it's their job what so what they can learn i'm not really sure how to apply this to

a government that there's a lot of red tape but the government we just get in there and help people because we can we're nimble we're small we're quick. what they could learn is to actually be a little more nimble and quick it took them weeks to raise to you know forego like osha and other sort of contingencies that were placed on workers. they can they can just move a little a little faster and provide for heaters from the government from the government from fema from the red cross all of them refuse teachers because a lot of people some people have power they don't have heat so providing these basic things for people it seems to be very hard for any of these huge agencies to do and they all they all apologize and say nice job. and we'll leave it at all right occupy activists goldie's thank you for your work and for everything you're doing out there and we'll see more of you i'm sure in the coming days and weeks

that is occupy activists goldie and you can see him at gorilla shack dot com first law enforcement officials want to the ability to listen in on your private phone conversations then they wanted access to your e-mail and internet activities now they are asking for access to your text messages the major cities police chiefs association which represents sixty three large police forces in the country those are the largest ones have submitted a proposal to congress that requires wireless providers to record and store information about americans private text messages for at least two years that is to say they want every. text message from every user stored for at least two years now i don't know about you but i text a lot so imagine a stockpile of text messages that wireless providers will be forced to store that's two trillion text messages that were sent in the u.s. last year alone so put a sign the ethical and moral aspects for

a minute is this type of data retention even possible here to break down all of this and more as our two web producer answer blake straight from the barbershop you know you don't text me that much anymore though i don't text you that much when you usually g. chat so i can't get up from my far enough and that's so that's a horse of a whole other color if you want to start talking about that kind of surveillance but you know this is so something that's worth often about today all right well why don't you break it down for us i mean how first of all let's just start with the storage space is it even possible to store this much information yeah sure i mean the money's just little pieces of text but right now we're talking about six billion text messages in the united states every single day it's like two trillion a year according to statistics from twenty ten twenty eleven i believe so it's a lot of information but we do know there's the whole n.s.a. data center being built over in utah and people say they're just collecting information is there even know how to handle it right now but law enforcement says that there's this information that if it was collected it was maintained somewhere

it would help with a lot of investigation because we right now we know right now that law enforcement agencies can access all sorts of phone records thing is a lot of these providers carry. they hold on to the tax data but sometimes they don't have to and congress if these major chiefs association has their way congress will be forced to say ok look telecoms you are going to have to hold on to this data for two years or pretty much is going to make it you know mandated that it exists so that from there they can do whatever the hell they want to do with it and so you say that they all have the potential of being able to store this but i know that certain wireless carriers like team mobile an a.t.m. to for instance choose not. to i say i was an impression that they didn't have the capacity to be able to store i mean we're talking about a lot of information there's actually if you go online i know. sorry still you put out a form last year going over the major telecom providers and what their own personal retention policies are when i actually think that form in a full screen if we can go ahead and bring that up and talk about which providers

in particular actually store it and as you can see on their verizon wireless stores there's for up to three to five days t. mobile cingular sprint and nextel choose not to and here's the whopper virgin mobile stores there's for ninety days they definitely take the cake so i haven't heard of the text message content and it's really important to know what is saved and what isn't because it's not necessarily the content that can really help out police here we've got to look at the metadata right now it's really easy for law enforcement to go ahead and get a court order that will allow them to see e-mails not necessarily the content of the e-mails but this metadata to see where information is going to who it's coming from to whom it's going to what the subject says where it was sent from that information is a lot easier to get than the actual contents of emails so when we look at text messages right now all these telecom providers they all have different attention policies about how they handle and how they maintain this metadata as well as the

actual hard content and all of them you know sure a lot of them don't want to the actual content but a lot of them all of them rather hold on to this the actual metadata for years in fact t. mobile five years eighteen singular five to seven years that information says you know mega little to send a text messages for andrew blake on december whatever date is seventh tour so that information could be accessed by by congress by investigators by law enforcement if they all have their way but but right now it's not mandated telecom's can do whatever the hell they want to do with this information but like you said we have this group the major chiefs are major cities chiefs of police so if you. ssion and that's officers from new york l.a. chicago miami there are asking for this and at the same time other groups national district attorneys association national sheriffs association they are also there in their head into this and saying look congress you should consider doing this of course it's not going to matter until congress actually goes and revamp the electronic communications privacy act which isn't going to happen till next year

but it could at least be brought up and can be put on the table in it's serious and which one are they trying to store in particular the metadata or everything that's involved in them or is it clear and it's really no we're still trying to figure out what's happening and we have a lot to learn about the electronic communications privacy act and you know in the grand scheme of things this actually isn't a total loss because there was actually the e.c.p.a. as as we call it up in the scene the e.c.p.a. had a really great victory last week when it was decided that it has a law enforcement agent wants to access someone's email that's older than one hundred eighty days are going to have to start getting warrants so when the e.c.p.a. goes up for renewal and if these long years that passes that's great for privacy advocates it's a really good step for americans who want to actually protect their online data but isn't it good to trade that off with having to lose cell phone privacy you know we'll see but it's something serious and it's we're just starting to get wind of it now declan mccullagh scene that broke the news the other day and we're still

following up on it and our t. actually reached out to a number of wireless providers we reached out to t. mobile verizon and things like that we also reached out to the c.t.a. and i do want to bring up a quote from them their statement they say that this issue contains important privacy and law and enforcement concerns and stakeholders in those areas as well as congress are the appropriate parties to assess those considerations now cia of course is a wireless group it's an industry trade group that represents a wide variety of interests on behalf of international wireless telecommunications companies so talk about that as it really is it really in the hands of congress in the stakeholders to be. to be able to decide this or shouldn't people be worried about what can come out of these text messages well i mean it's up to congress but it's up to the people who elect those people that are going to make those decisions so ultimately congress is going to have to go ahead and say this is what we want to do because that's what the people are telling us to do when we saw with like sopa and pipa last year there was such such such

a huge blowback over what that would do for not necessarily privacy but just the information sharing on the internet that those concerns were heard and you know just recently we saw that there's been huge changes to the n.d.a. for next year and we know how crazy the support was to try to abolish that indefinite detention provision so you can always make the argument that oh you know washington doesn't work that lawmakers on the hill are idiots but the same point if you have to go back and say ok well they will listen to the people if the people make their message heard loud and clear so there's a there's a chance that you know while this is up to congress that if people actually say look this is my dad i'm going to hold onto it myself they will get that then again there will always be other alternative providers you will always be able to find a way around this as far if history is any precedent congress is always going to be like five steps behind technology so keep your fingers crossed that's going to stay that way oh we're going to have to watch and see how this all unfolds theirself so many things are up in the air and you blake our web producer thank you so much for joining our. all right to the economy now despite decent job numbers coming out of

today's monthly jobs report there's still another big question mark looming over the economy that is whether congress will pass a plan before december thirty first to avoid bringing the nation over the so-called fiscal cliff the question of course is what to do about the struggling economy and that is certainly not a new one two and a half years ago two men former u.s. senator alan simpson are republican and former white house chief of staff for president clinton erskin bowles a democrat came up with a possible solution what they came up with is known to those even outside of the ball outside the beltway as the simpson bowles or the bull simpson plan depending on which way you see it and despite falling short of passing it off and took center stage and talks about the economy for most of the year expression leave during the presidential campaign governor what about simpson bowles you support simpson bowles

simpson bowles the president should have grabbed that i mean do you support some simple i have my own plan it's not the same as in symbols but in my view the president should have grabbed it if you want to make some adjustments to that take it go to congress fight for it that's what we've done made some adjustments to it and we're putting it forward before congress right now but even though you everyone now has now heard of the plan very few people actually know what's in it r t political correspondent christine frizz out took a look through the plan and picked out five things that you should know about some symbols. erskine bowles is a sixty seven year old democrat from north carolina and these days he's often out and about touring the country with his sidekick eighty one year old republican alan simpson the odd couple chaired the so-called super committee back in two thousand and ten which president obama created to find a balance between republican and democratic plans to solve the debt crisis now that committee ended up as a less than super it ultimately didn't even approve its own report but simpson and

bowles are keeping their plan alive or at least trying to by selling it as the last best hope for an ailing economy. and the first thing you need to know is that it is fair to ask whether this is truly a great compromise since the planet rests on the assumption that the bush tax cuts for those making more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year will end even though simpson bowles plan takes that as a given current republican legislators are less willing to immediately let that exploration take place in fact that happens to be issue number one for republicans who see letting the cuts expire as synonymous to raising tax rates. number two simpson bowles raises the gas tax by fifteen cents now this is self-explanatory but not widely known raising the gas tax could be seen as a big blow to those big oil companies but if i had about companies like exxon mobil which by the way made forty one billion dollars in profit last year probably are

going to let those profits go down it would more likely mean customers paying more at the pump. third half of the program cuts in the original simpson bowles plan have already been achieved so taking a look at the math if you see of the two point nine trillion dollars of program cuts about one point five trillion have already been announced it looks like congress at least was listening to that part of the plan. for social security may no longer be the third rail in american. the text simpson bowles makes three main changes to social security it increases the taxable maximum on income to ninety percent of all income which would raise two hundred thirty eight billion dollars over the next decade it also uses a different measure of inflation to slow cost of living adjustments and it also raises the retirement age once again now for decades after social security was first implemented back in one nine hundred thirty seven the retirement age stayed

at sixty five if they want to sixty six and there is a plan in the works already to get the increase up to sixty seven but simpson bowles changes that to sixty eight in twenty fifty and sixty nine and twenty seventy five and the fifth thing you should know when discussing ways to improve the economy and create revenue alan simpson and erskine bowles are making a little bit of revenue themselves the new york times recently reported that the proof of their appeal is that some business groups pay them forty thousand dollars each for appearance simply for the honor of hearing the discuss budget and baselines now that they're not totally earning their money check this out. to grammy your breakfast and tweeting your first world problems and getting on you tube so you can see gangnam style all right so alan simpson doing the gangnam style dance or try to get young people involved in a campaign focused on cutting the national debt that's pretty amazing it's part of

what they call the can kicks back in reference of course to congress kicking the can down the road when it comes to coming up with permanent solutions to economic problems but these are just a few interesting tidbits from the plan that everyone seems to be talking about but most people aren't totally sure why in washington christine for south r.t. . all right well sticking with the topic of the economy fears of falling over the proverbial fiscal cliff how force the issue to the top of the congressional agenda the upcoming financial crisis was created by congress to force congress to act and is now acting against congress so much so that it could potentially cause the us to spiral into a congressional mandated recession so are you prepared for that or do you think this whole thing will blow over in a last minute deal lorie harshness of the resident dot net took that question to the streets of the financial capital of the world to find out.

america is about to go over the fiscal cliff are you worried what should we do about it this week let's talk about that do you know the fiscal cliff. do you think a lot of americans do so then why is the media talking about it incessantly well so go there i guess i'm not as informed as they should be but i just kind of figure it might work out do you think most people feel that way you know even most people are worried i think they are and i think that if i ignored it all go away do you think calling it something like the fiscal cliff minimizes it yes or no i definitely agree that it's a complex problem i don't think it simplifies it though i think it adds an element of panic or fear looming. doom and the media loves that yeah do you think there's actually something to worry about or do you think it's something the politicians in the media used to distract us from what's really going on politics and media for sure so what's really going on that they're distracting us from. their own personal

agendas people fall into a trip when it comes to real life. people that don't do their job. yeah which is all of them in a word yes yes it's they're much more concerned with their own agendas and their own you know ties that they were already got used to be there was a thought at one time that the incumbent should never be. reelected it doesn't mean anyone at the top or the bottom which should be everyone should have one term and that's it if they're not really trying to work together three business journals or in twenty four hours a day and it's good news nothing else is happening we already caught bin ladin so we move on and we just talk about the fiscal cliff correct i always carry everybody everybody in their system yes even though nothing's really going to change because the economy's like that he might well i think it'll change i just don't think they're going to do anything about it do you think they can figure it out or do you think it's up to us individually to do something. so what are you going to. work to . work pay bills and don't spend a lot that you don't have. we're going to swell because they're going to spend i'm

going to use them i will spend the woman whether or not americans are worried about the fiscal cliff the bottom line is the media is milking the crap out of the phrase while realistically nothing drastic is probably going to happen. all right well that's going to do it for the news for this week but be sure to tune in next week for a brand new line up we've all heard of too big to fail and during the financial crisis we saw just how susceptible those banks really were but can that offense and history be described as too big to cut the military does after all provide tens of thousands of jobs for americans across the country at least that's the argument that lawmakers are making to to try to defend themselves and the military industry against sequester ation next week we'll look out will look at how big the defense industry has grown and ask if it's really worth congressional production and

this is the end of the year in this just to show a few short weeks away so we here at r t have decided to close out the year by taking a look back at who are some of the most influential people of two thousand and twelve so who will make the list tune in next week. and before we ring in that new year there's still christmas hanukkah kwanza and other holidays to worry about and what's the best way for u.s. consumers to show their unquantifiable love for others gifts of course but some of the high tech toys stores are stocking their shelves with these days have some more intrusive qualities about them next week a look at this season's tech toys and what it means for your privacy now those are just a few of the stories we have in store for you next week along with more news and in-depth interviews so keep it tuned in right here to our t.v. and that's going to do it for me for tonight but for more on the stories we cover go to youtube dot com slash arts.